tuesday, august 17

last night pulling onto 180 to go the three miles home
i stopped for a couple kids who had murdered a tire on a
curb somewhere, and let them destroy
my shitty manufacturer-supplied jack
trying to change it

for some reason i was out of it
and just watched
despite myself having changed the tires on beat cars
with a clockwork regularity for years
and in the end i didn't do much for them
the girl wouldn't take a ride anywhere
refused to leave the car by the road
and so i left them with the useless lug wrench
and drove off to bed

closer to awake,
and i might have been more use
or i might have just kept going
in the first place
as is i guess, it was just
an intersection with someone else's bad night
and i hope they got where they were going
but it left me again
with that old thought that life is a series of tests,
right, and each one is a gateway to some kind
of possibility
a door you're stepping through, or a vastly connected node
on a branching graph of potential collisions —
move in the direction of why not?
court the instability of abandoning worn-in experience
(like a bike tire jumping a rut)
and things happen.